Work Text:
The office workers at the Hokage Tower often found themselves wondering the change of seasons and the shenanigans of their fellow shinobis, regardless of the ranks they shamelessly gossiped about. However lazy and unproductive the field ranks thought them being, they were in fact the most ruthless motley crew there was, with cunning former field strategists and brilliant bureucratic minds put under the same roof, not many of them even blinking an eye when bending the regulations and reformatting the directives to serve what they saw necessary for the village. With deadly accuracy rivalling many names in Bingo Books, they pulled favors and drew statistic from left, right and center on their mission to make Konohagakure flourish. Furthermore, they were very focused people when it came to dealing with obstacles that they found hindering their work.
As it was, as far as the desk jockeys reasoned over their cooling lunch, it seemed that the two highly respected men who had featured in many rumors for the past week had not yet agreed on how to go about this apparent new stage of their suddenly outed acquaintanceship. Some had noted that after the disastrous event at Ichiraku had left them with quite a clear idea that hiding the progressing status of the admittedly romantic relationship was a vain wish, the headmaster Umino-san and Rokudaime Hokage Hatake-sama, had, much to many nins' passing wonder, established a very strange status quo between their public and private lives.
Namely tip-toeing around the toe-curling temptation to officially lay a claim to one another.
During the afternoon coffee break, many argued that the dynamics the men drew in their heads concerning that were far more complicated than the most ludicrous projectile angle calculations, hand seal sequences and grammar rules. To top that off, some added that neither of the men admitted it when they were caught eying one another in a way how any self-respecting nin looked at a shiny new kunai on a payday. A few claimed that if the Rokudaime had spent even a quarter of the concentration the man had reserved for staring at Umino-san's talking mouth for doing the actual paperwork, the administrative departments would have sorted out the village's financial, educational and strategical plans for the next ten years without a single comma out of place. Not to mention that the accumulating amount of neatly snapped pens that were the courtesy of Umino-san's derailing thoughts whenever their silver-haired leader dipped his voice low during the Academy headmaster's audience was already wreaking havoc to their budget for office supplies.
Thus, during one bustling afternoon hour, when they had spied Umino-san once again making his way to the offices, the horizontal scar on the man's nose adorning a fleeting pink tinge that had more likely to do with raging hormones than the beautifully blooming cherry trees, a strategic emergency meeting was called by all administrative departments. The debate was heated. The decoding faculty were miffed with the paperwork that resulted from the riddled flirting between the two idiots which made many of the recorded meeting tapes a pain to transcribe. On their side, the archives staff was beyond annoyed to find the Academy's report folders in constant disarray ever since the game the two played had started to affect Umino-san's impeccable organizing skills. The foreign trade personnel on their part were fed up tracking down all the rare tea types their idiotic leader would think that the headmaster would fancy, which led to the acquisition clerks tearing their hair off when trying to figure out just where did Hatake-sama think that they dug out the money they had to spend on freight costs and bribing the customs. However, seeing that the Ramen Date Incident was still in fresh memory to many, a swift consensus was reached and the drastic measures were decided on.
It was agreed that as endearing as it was to see two seasoned shinobis get caught playing shy footsie during administrative hours and eye-banging one another when they thought no one was glaring at them, nobody in the Tower was getting any proper work done if the couple didn't take things to the next level. Hence the plans were drawn, the clocks were synchronized, the coffee was drunk and the shinobis of the Tower's offices geared up to show just how smoothly they could get things rolling when the stakes were high enough.
Alas, as it usually went when it came to the karma between their silver-haired superior commander and anything that had to do with administrative staff, they accounted too late the factors that promptly shot it all to hell.
Granted, as the man to carry out the plan, they perhaps should not have chosen the new chuunin who had been placed to office work after a disastrous mission that had nearly annihilated his auris interna, which not only had made him sensitive to loud and high-pitched noises but had also affected permanently his sense of coordination – a fact that made many feel sympathetic towards his 195.5 centimeters tall figure. They could have also left out the three manila folders that had made the already precariously piled paperwork tilt and turn the whole 360 degrees in his hands on each step that the poor man took on his way to the Hokage's personal office. They could have also re-checked the date and time for the spontaneously scheduled intervention, since the visiting second graders and their harried teachers admittedly hadn't been expecting a tower of paperwork to crash upon them when they had rounded the corner on their way to see the Hokage's office. To the horror of the adults, the children had been eagerly awaiting for an opportunity to flee from their teachers' grasps to their best non-existing abilities, the resulting ruckus alarming the ANBU guards who had been on their way to grab a bite, which had led to nobody noticing how the growing commotion in the hallway had finally caught the attention of the two targets who the frazzled office chuunin had been attempting to ambush.
As he had mentally wept for his bleeding ears and at the sight of trampled papers, wrinkled folders, the ruined general order of the Universe and the circus of students, teachers and Black Ops that had roared around him, the man had not heard the click of the door behind his rigid back, nor had he seen the pair of students that had forgotten the most basics of their shinobi training and hadn't looked where they were running – and thus, in the true fashion of chaos, had set off a following flurry of events, as it was later described. In their haste to escape the restraining jutsu of their teacher's aide, the two youngsters had barreled straight into the miserable chuunin standing in their way, the resulting impact of tiny bodies pushing the legs out from under the lanky man whose body was seemingly unprepared for it. That in turn not only had him fall towards the ground but had also got him caught in the momentum of the hit, which had made his vision take a sharp turn of 180 degrees to face the blurs that had appeared in the open doorway. Later it was heard that in his desperate attempt to stop his fall, the flailing chuunin's shinobi instincts had kicked in and had made him not only to reach for the closest steady object he could grab, but to look straight into the surprised dark brown eyes as his body had landed squarely against a solid chest, and his gaping mouth had pressed against something that had his brain freeze on the spot.
The hush of silence that had flooded the chaotic halls like a silent wave of dark waters was later described to have been so intense that even the birds outside the building had stopped chirping, and as he had idly noted that Umino-san's upper lip was certainly softer than what many jounins had bitterly claimed it to be, the office chuunin had counted his feeble blessings when the yelling and lightning had started.
Later on, when the guardians of the second graders asked if their charges had learned anything on that day's field trip to the Hokage Tower, the children duly noted that even though working in the field seemed really hard with all kinds of dangerous missions, working in the Hokage Tower was undoubtedly an S-class position and now many of the students had a new sense of awed respect towards those family members who had to work there.
What the kids did not know was that in the following morning, the administrative department received a discreet delivery of flowers. Furthermore, pinned to the bouquet was a nondescript handwritten card, the flowing lines and loops of the written words apologizing for the shaken state their colleague had been in when the man had been brought back to the safety of his department once the ANBU and Umino-san had been able to talk down and restrain one ballistic Hokage, the headmaster's carefully placed words also mentioning the small donation that had been transferred from the Hokage's personal account to the faculty's annual hotspring trip fund.
In the end, as they spied a glow that shared no business with the pleasure of flower viewing on the tan face when Umino-san casually skipped his steps to Hatake-sama's office later in the afternoon, the workers of the Hokage Tower raised their sake cups to the small victories of making the wheels of the village's bureaucracy turn without a hitch once again, even though the nins manning the interior design department dreaded the day when the request for a new Hokage's desk came through the intercom.